Knowing that, I perform a thorough inspection under good light. Typically it’s the larger SMD multi-layer ceramic caps (MLCCs) that seem to get damaged from rough handling, though not always. How I found that’s not the case turned out to be almost by coincidence.Īs with all used GPUs I get (be it eBay, Craigslist, or wherever else), I always check for missing, cracked, and broken SMD components on the back of the PCB (and a quick glance at the front too.) You might be surprised, but I can say that about 50% of the time, I easily get cards with a minimum of one chipped or missing SMD component. I don’t, so when I first saw the artifacts, I assumed it was yet another video card with a failed GPU to add to my collection. I suppose the video artifact pattern may tell a clue as to what is failed, if one knows more about how the GPU and GPU RAM interface exactly.
Here is what the video displayed when hooked to a monitor:Īs you can see, the picture is mostly correct, but there were horizontal-running black lines across the image. You can also see the resistances of the GPU V_core, RAM, and GPU V_tt I noted down on a sticky note, as I initially thought this GPU will need a reflow (it didn’t.) Pictures of the video card, just for reference: The video card I have is a Gigabyte Radeon HD6850 with 1 GB of gDDR5 RAM. Although the GPU I’m about to show is not exactly “modern” anymore, it is still fairly relevant in terms of hardware design to modern GPUs. But with many modern GPUs, it seems that’s the case most of the time. I myself usually try not to assume this either. Probably anyone who has repaired video cards before already knows this: video artifacts are not always caused by a bad GPU chip.